Wage-Labor and Capital
Chapter I
Preliminary
From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves upon the surface of the political conflicts.
It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the development of the class struggle in the history of our own day, and to prove empirically, by the actual and daily new-created historical material, that with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, the opponents of that class—the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes, who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the whole continent of Europe—were simultaneously conquered ; that the victory of the “moderate republic” in France sounded, at the same time, the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally, that by the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November, 1848,
